Vertical Secondary Nav ?

I have been using the secondary nav to show the child pages which has been great. My only concern is that I am not able to apply Certain CSS values to it. I have tried

#secondnav

{

display:block;
width:60px;

}

to make it vertical to no avail, and some of the postioning atributes are not applying. I may be useing the wrong Base theme, but when I outline it I can tell that is the one I want to use. I am assuming it is within the footer and has other attributes applied to it that are not in the #secondnav theme. I am new to this so any help would be much appreciated!